330 HISTORY OF LITERATURE 



Wilhelm and the publications of his brother, the Sprache und 

 Weisheit der Indier, 1808, and the lectures on the History of Oriental 

 and Modern Literature, 1815, enriched not only the romantic charac- 

 ter, but the alterthumswissenschaftlich method or aspiration of the 

 period. By the aesthetic teachings of the Romantiker, Germany was 

 cultivated to a taste for Spanish and English drama as opposed to 

 the formal and so-called classical productions of France and Italy. 

 Hence the admirable Shakespearian criticism which, beginning in 

 the earlier part of the century, continued well into the latter half; the 

 impulse imparted by Tieck and Wilhelm von Schlegel abode in 

 Gervinus, Kreyssig, Elze, Ulrici, and Delius, and still lives in the 

 Jahrbucher der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft. 



During this period of scientific expansion, the philosophical 

 aesthetic movement is represented, in addition to Solger, by Schelling 

 and Hegel. Mr. Bosanquet, in his History of Esthetic, tells us that 

 Goethe and Schiller had developed the Kantian aesthetic, "limited 

 by abstraction and subjectivity into an objective, concrete content, 

 which grows with the life and mind of man." Hegel tells us that the 

 true line of succession ran from Schiller to Schelling. "Science," he 

 says, " attained its absolute standpoint in Schelling's philosophy, and 

 although art had previously begun to assert its particular nature and 

 dignity in relation to the highest interests of humanity, yet it was 

 now that the actual notion of art, and its place in scientific theory, 

 were discovered." Schelling treats of beauty as the objective and 

 necessarily historical expression of divinity as uttering itself through 

 man. Hegel begins with the human side of this utterance, and shows 

 how in the stages of symbolism, classicism, and romanticism, man's 

 subjectivity tries to express itself in proper content and form, vaguely 

 striving to suggest the thought by crude and uncouth shapes in prim- 

 itive symbolic art, uniting the thought and the objective form in 

 classical art, and in romantic breaking the bonds of actual necessity 

 and yearning toward a spiritual manifestation. Hegel's aesthetic is 

 subjective-objective, both philosophical and historical. His ideal- 

 ism has influenced, positively or negatively, all sestheticians and 

 critics from his time down. His arraignment of the theory which 

 would limit the scope and aim of art to imitation is of the utmost 

 importance in the history of criticism as well as of art itself. By an 

 utter misapprehension of Aristotle's theory of imitation, which care- 

 fully distinguished between the useful arts (or handicrafts) and the 

 fine arts, saying that art imitates the processes of nature in the 

 former, and an idealized or glorified nature in the latter, nearly all 

 writers on aesthetics from Lord Kaimes down, Batteux, Diderot, 

 Baumgarten, Moritz, even to the time of Winckelmann, had 

 apprehended art as a more or less exact copy of the face of things: so 

 that nature being considered perfect, art could be but an apologetic 



